


Touching Freedom

by endeni



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Blanket Permission, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Dubious Consent, F/M, M/M, Multi, Origin Story, Original Character Death(s), Podfic Welcome, Prostitution, Rogue One Spoilers, Underage Sex, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-12 15:50:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9079345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endeni/pseuds/endeni
Summary: The things Cassian has done for the Cause.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Not betaed, so feel free to point out any issues. ;)

**I.**

“They don't own me,” his sister says to him after Cassian finds her in her room with a client, an _Imperial_ , slapping her around.

All of six years old and somewhat scrawny for his age, Cassian half remembers launching himself at the man, his fist raised into a punch.

It happens in an instant. One moment he’s standing by the door, hearing his sister gasp, the next she’s dragging him out of the room, stopping him before Cassian could try and land a hit. Before the man could hit him in turn, really.

“Let go, let go!” Cassian exclaims as he tries to slip off Onna’s grip on his arm, his cheeks burning with fury and shame.

“How can you let them do this to you, let them treat you like that?” he spits, even if he knows the answer already.

Their mother is dead, killed on Empire Day. Children of a traitor, he and his sister got no compensation money.

Onna just gives him a tired smile.

“Look,” his sister says, bending down to stand eye to eye with him, her warm hands on his biceps, “can you keep a secret?”

Cassian frowns, surprised at the seriousness of those eyes, of her tone. He nods.

Onna takes a datapad out of the folds of her skirt, raising it high until they’re both looking at it.

“They don't own me,” she repeats, slowly this time. “What they do with my body, it doesn't matter. They think they can take what they want, do what they want, to us, to the whole galaxy. But they’re wrong, Cassian, okay? They’re _wrong_.”

 

* * *

 

That day, Cassian finishes his duties at the House: scrubs the floors, changes the sheets and does laundry and prepares the evening meal. He goes to sleep on the cramped, bare room he shares with his sister, a far cry from the luscious one she uses for work.

In the morning, he gets up and heads toward the town market, buys food and necessities.

He passes by the sweet stand of the old Sullustan lady and asks for a pastry. He slips her the datapad as he pays.

He savors the sweet on his way home.

 

 

 

**II.**

A few years later, they come to the House.

Stormtroopers in their white armors and inscrutable helms, armed with blaster rifles. They throw everything in the air, ransacking the place.

Onna looks at him behind a stormtrooper’s shoulder. In a flash, she’s taking something out of her pocket, light glinting off it -a knife?- and launching herself at the man.

The stormtrooper shoots her. They shoot everyone.

Cassian runs, hides.

 

* * *

 

Cassian knowns where Onna hid the datapad, knows what that look meant: Forgive me. Couldn’t let them find it. This is too important.

Later that night, he comes out of hiding and carefully digs out the stick from the small garden behind the House. In the morning he presents it to the old lady at the market.

Cassian isn’t quite ten years old and all he has left is the aching void inside, the fury and the pain.

 

* * *

 

From the viewport of a cargo ship, Cassian watches the Imperial base getting smaller and smaller as the ship lifts off the planet, the flames enveloping the base visible even from atmosphere.

 _They don't own me_ , Cassian repeats to himself, something like a smile on his lips, _they don’t own us._ His sister’s words, heard so often they seeped through Cassian’s skin.

His sister, his mother… they're all still dead. He’s still alone. But he feels… something. Something like fulfillment perhaps.

He still has something to fight for, a _purpose_.

 

 

 

**III.**

The Rebellion teaches him how to kill from up close, with knives and poison, and how to do it from a distance, with rifles and sabotage.

He learns how to steal information. How to hack into terminals, how to gather secrets and confidences.

Some of it, he knows already.

Imperials love young (too young) boys as much as they love prosperous, dark-haired girls like his sister was.

Hidden in the dark corners of a cantina, or inside a rented room near the local spaceport, Cassian drops his pants and opens his legs. Gets on his knees and opens his mouth.

Back at the Home, he watched the girls with their clients sometimes, it isn’t that different.

Plump faces and cruel eyes, they all look the same to Cassian.

He lets them do their business, bears the pain and rank breaths, the too-big hands on his skin.

Afterward he gets what he needs, takes the information he came for. And he can _always_ get what he came for.

 

* * *

 

Whenever he has the luxury of a sonic shower, Cassian takes to scrubbing himself raw, rubbing away the bloodied hands on his body, trying to wash away the blood on his own.

 _They don't own me_ , he repeats to himself. _What they’re doing to my body is immaterial._

 

* * *

 

There's a young Imperial Commander once, with startling green eyes. Cassian meets him at a party.

He plays the part, smiles, acts charming, and the man brings him back home to his wife afterward, a woman with wide hips and a wide smile.

The fall in bed in a tangle of limbs and the act is… unexpectedly slow, gentle almost. It’s kisses and caresses and Cassian being shared between the two of them like a prize, like it matters to them whether Cassian enjoys himself in the process too.

He wakes up early in the night, extricates himself from the bed and goes to the terminal by the door.

“Hey! What are you-”

Cassian turns and shoots the man right between his green eyes. He shoots the woman too, extracts the information he needs and leaves.

 

* * *

 

Once, Cassian places a bomb on a busy street, right on the path of an Imperial convoy.

In his head, he can still see the bodies on the ground, can still hear the high-pitched despair of a mother’s scream.

 

* * *

 

He has friends. But never lovers. Can’t let anyone too close, can't bring himself to let someone touch him like that willingly, not when it's not for a mission.

 

* * *

 

Sitting in a Rebellion workshop, Cassian works on stripping the droid he stole from his Imperial code.

While his hands work, Cassian’s mind gets lost in thought.

He imagines being able to forget with the same ease, to delete his memories with a click of his fingers, to just… wipe away all the pain, the guilt.

But then he’d forget his family too. He can’t have that.

Shandra Brandt Andor, Captain of the Republic Navy. Cassian imagines his mother putting her blaster between a clone trooper and a Jedi, resisting, objecting, getting killed for it. Leaving him and Onna alone.

 _Onna_.

By now, Cassian doesn’t remember a time when he hadn’t worked for the Rebellion, one way or the other, be it sneaking information to an old lady at the market or slicing someone’s throat.

His mother, his sister. The memories of them -their faces, the sound of their voices- have become blurred and far-away too, the women of his life sort of coalescing into a single entity, a figure with dark hair and a determined mouth, someone who loved him and died, was killed, left him alone.

“Hello,” the droid opens his eyes and Cassian startles back to the present, his fingers flying to his blaster.

The droid doesn’t seem inclined to push his face through the wall, though.

“Who are you?” the droid asks, bending his head in what seems like confusion. “More importantly, who am _I_?”

 

* * *

 

Cassian is on a terraformed moon, trying to secure a weapons deal for the Rebellion, and the man- the _target_ is pushing him back, his hands already unbuckling Cassian’s pants.

Cassian’s shoulder hits the sharp edge of the wall, hard, and he lets out a pained sound.

“Fuck, slow down, ma-”

Suddenly, Cassian sees Kay’s cybernetic body stand out against the opening of the small alley. A few heavy steps and the target ends up unconscious on the ground.

“I think I told you to stay back,” Cassian shouts as he and K-2SO run back to the ship, the Syndicate guards at their heels, blaster shots flying over their heads.

“You did, Cassian,” Kay serenely shouts back.

 

* * *

 

“I do not understand how you could let that Corellian treat you like that, Cassian,” Kay says to him afterward, in lieu of an explanation.

The droid’s unwavering aversion toward seeing Cassian hurt brings an unexpected warm to Cassian’s chest. And a tightness he refuses to identify, because Kay’s words echo those, half-forgotten, of a six years old boy. Many, many years before.

When they return to the base, Cassian tells General Draven that he’s no longer fit for _those kind_ of operations.

The general simply nods, looking at Cassian with something like admiration, no- puzzlement almost.

Like he never expected Cassian to last as long as he did in the first place, like he’d been waiting for those words to come out of his mouth for years now and he’s almost surprised he’s finally hearing them.

Cassian wonders if Onna would have done the same for him, eventually. Would the both of them ever been able to find work somewhere else? Would she have wanted to? He can't imagine it. All that fire in her, Cassian suspects she would have seen it as giving up.

 

* * *

 

When he showers, he still scrubs himself raw.

 

 

 

**IV.**

Cassian is twenty-six. He’s older than his sister ever was.

He decides to grow a beard. Because he can now, he doesn't need to look young and sweet any more.

He has friends, a family of sorts again, he has something to fight for. It’s more than other people have.

Somehow, this should be enough.

Then, he meets Jyn Erso.

 

* * *

 

After -after Jedha, after Eadu- her fire inspires them all, shames Cassian into being better, doing better.

The dark hair, the determined mouth, she reminds him of his mother. Of his sister, ready to go against a Stormtrooper with just a kitchen knife.

More than that, she reminds Cassian of himself.

Just like him, she lost everyone, the Mission her only legacy.

 

* * *

 

Cassian’s lips brush Jyn’s in the elevator, voluntarily seeking physical contact for once, holding her desperate gaze, wanting- oh, _wanting_.

At the end, she takes his hand.

And then it’s Cassian who takes her into his arms, pressing his face against Jyn’s hair, holding on tight as much as he can, as much as she does.

A shame to die now, he thinks. A shame she is to die with me.

 _I’m done_ , he thinks suddenly. _I’m free_. No more Empire, no more duty or impossible expectations.

Cassian holds Jyn into his arms and shuts his eyes.


End file.
